BASIC

The original BASIC was designed in 1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. BASIC was first successfully used to run programs on the school’s General Electric computer system. They wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, when home computers were in their heyday, BASIC did as much as anything else to make them useful.

According to the TIOBE index, Visual Basic .NET is ranked as the 5th most popular programming language. BBC BASIC is ranked outside the top 50.

There is a good range of open source software available to write and compile BASIC programs. The table below shows our 11 recommended free BASIC software. Click the links to learn about the software.

BlitzMax – BASIC dialect, and the latest Blitz language by Blitz Research Limited.

Brandy Basic – implements Basic V, the dialect of Basic that Acorn Computers supplied with their ranges of desktop computers that use the ARM processor such as the Archimedes and RiscPC. Basic V is an extended version of BBC Basic. This was the Basic used on the BBC Micro that Acorn made during the early 1980s.

cbmbasic – portable version of Commodore’s version of Microsoft BASIC 6502 as found on the Commodore 64.

About The Author

Steve Emms is the main author of OSSBlog.org. This site aims to promote open source software and hardware. Steve has written thousands of articles about open source software. He is also the creator of LinuxLinks.com.

2 Comments

This comment is in relation to your sub-article on Matrix Brandy BASIC.

Dave Daniels is the original author, however his work at Sourceforge hasn’t been touched since 2015.

Since development there had stagnated, I decided to fork it, and MatrixBrandy is my fork where I’ve been working with the Stardot community to iron out remaining bugs and enhance the graphics capabilities (one of which you included in the article, I added Mode 7 teletext support) and some emulation of RISC OS operating system functions where they could be translated into SDL functionality.